Wired has more on why Netflix is getting into anime, and it can be summed up in three points:
- Trying to compete with Crunchyroll, not in scope but with exclusive titles
- Anime is one of the cheaper end of things, especially compared to $100 million for a season of House of Cards, and it's easier to manage subs and dubs for anime than live aciton
- By owning the shows outright, they can keep the programs streaming forever, around the world

They're doing 'Baki'?! Sweet! I knew I was going to watch Godzilla before even watching that trailer.posted by P.o.B. at 4:40 PM on August 14, 2017

Some of these look good and some look real, real bad.posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:12 PM on September 3, 2017

I can't imagine Netflix thinks of Crunchyroll as anything more than a niche also-ran. But Amazon has been sniping a lot of the high-profile anime titles for the past couple seasons and Netflix will sure as shit want to make sure they don't let Amazon monopolize that.

Tangentially, this has been good-and-bad for my own viewing on Crunchyroll. On the one hand, their lists have included a lot more series with subjects outside of anime stereotypes (total lack of teenagers saving the world, screaming cute girls, robots of any kind, etc.). But on the other hand, it's obvious they're beginning to starve for popular content and breakout hits; they're running these niche series because the merchandisable stuff is beyond their grasp now. The merger with Funimation should have brought them stuff like One-Punch Man but Amazon sniped that, and other high-profile series like One Piece, and Naruto spinoffs are not exclusives so Amazon won't be losing any traffic to Crunchyroll for them.

So for the summer and fall, Crunchyroll has been padding more of their roster with live-action series. On the one hand, Ultraman (which you can take or leave, but it's sui generis). On the other, reality shows and talk shows, which is at best tangential to what I'd be paying an anime network subscription fee for.

If Crunchyroll wants to claw back their market, the biggest most obvious thing to do is use a huge pile of cash to outbid two of America's biggest whales for the big shows. That's not gonna happen. But the other thing they can do is strengthen their fanbase loyalty by fixing their user experience and enhancing their ancillary content. Their TV app provides no way to sort shows by season (which is critical when the vast majority of their content is on seasonal schedules) and their website has innumerable content blind spots and bugs that prevent it from being an information nexus for the shows they want to make money on. Their iPad app is better than either, but still requires me to go elsewhere if I want to, for example, find out what else the production company of a given series might have worked on. They could become a valuable niche as an information center, and they'd have my loyalty for good if they started delivering old anime from the 1960s and 70s; there are thousands of hours of that and only the most high-profile bits of it are easily available in English translation.

I could rant all day. I'm not an avid enough media consumer to want to pay three subscription services just to watch a couple hours of TV a week. (Even Amazon Prime members have to pay an additional monthly fee for their anime fix). So I'm pretty loyal to Crunchyroll for series on nominally mundane topics like office work or rural modernization, but I also have to acknowledge that their status quo, even if it makes me happy, is going to starve them, so they're either going to have to go deep or go wide.posted by ardgedee at 6:10 AM on October 9, 2017